Interesting Conversation to learn about Daraz Ads

In the last 18 months, we have been on an amazing journey of building a solid retail media ad network, which has created a considerable impact on both, the domains of performance marketing as well as brand building.

I have spent hours and days discussing the products, features and dynamics of Daraz Ads to a wide range of clients. There is still a great room to reach more and share the answers to their queries. In the quest to share the platform’s advertising capabilities, below I am writing some of the most common conversations and the answers to the advertisers’ questions.

Most advertisers start with understanding that how an ecommerce platform can also serve as an advertising avenue for them. Scroll down to read the excerpts from the interesting conversations.

Part 1: Establishing the emergence of Retail Media

Advertiser: So, Daraz is an ecommerce platform, how do I take it as an advertising network?

Answer: I will start by explaining the fact that Daraz offers the largest in-market audience in a one-day window and a 30 day window each. Daraz has more than 2 Million Daily Active Users or DAU. All of these users are either actively shopping, or planning their next purchase and hence, they are the most valuable audience from an advertising viewpoint. Daraz has an even bigger number of DAU if we include other regions; Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal & Myanmar. Moreover, this number grows more than double when we stream popular sporting events such as Cricket.

While, we are the biggest in-market audience platform, from the size of audience, we are also the 4th biggest advertising platform after Google, Meta & Tiktok.

Q. So, you are saying that being 4th largest audience and the largest in-market audience should be enough for me to consider Daraz as a significant advertising platform?

Answer: There is more to it then. You see – The death of third-party cookies and serious legislations from GDPR, CCPA and other data protection laws have made it difficult and almost impossible to target audiences, which has given a significant rise to Retail Media networks, because of their ability to offer immense first-party data. So, in the absence of Third-Party Cookies, your biggest alternative to targeting will come from the humongous shoppers’ data that a retail media owns.

Even further, according to WARC, the global advertising spend will hit $1 Trillion in less than 2 years, where more than half of it will go to 5 companies – Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba & Tiktok. Two of them are the fastest growing retail advertising mediums. Daraz is part of Alibaba!

Advertiser: Ahan, you mentioned retail media? How would you define that?

Answer: See, Retail media is advertising near or around the places where actual transactions are happening. In other words, it is advertising placed on a retailer’s website/app, where you are able to build your brand recall among the shoppers.

The ability to attract a user's attention towards your product’s advertising on an ecommerce channel is more effective as compared to attracting their attention when they are consuming content, because on a retail app a user is already there with an intent to make a purchase and therefore, this is a perfect time to pitch in your products & brands to the user, which they can or will buy, if they keep seeing them. So, it’s not just about the audience, it’s about the audience behavior on different platforms.

Advertiser: Why brands are shifting their budgets towards retail media?

Brand are using retail media for these reasons:

1. With the demise of third-party cookies, it is the most viable alternative to audience targeting.
2. Driving consumer behavior, understanding the buying patterns and steering the growth accordingly.
3. Driving brand sales, and capture the rapid transition from offline to online sales and conversions.

Hence Retail Media Advertising has become one of the fastest growing channels around the globe. They have their own benchmarks, unique advertising solutions and more in-depth first-party data.

Part 2: Marketing Solutions

Advertiser: Alright – So, what marketing solutions do you have?

Answer: To start off, Daraz Marketing Solutions or DMS covers an entire staircase from upper funnel to lower funnel. Not only this, we also offer content & engagement solutions, which will further enhance brand your building activities.

Our Solutions include;

• Product Ads – which focuses on Lower funnel, but also enables branding for your products in the listings. A click-based Performance Solution
• Display Ads – reserved buying and biddable buying on the most premium real estate on the app’s homepage. An impression-based Branding solution.
• Daraz Live, Affiliates & Push Messages - includes running live commerce shows on the platform, push messages and offering the reach and traffic derived from the affiliate network. A content & an engagement solution.

We also offer amazing DMS 360 tailor-made campaigns, which are Category Leadership campaigns that are offered occasionally to brands looking to build a huge buzz. They are not offered to every partner, a partner needs to qualify a certain criteria to have these offered to them. :)

Product Ads

Advertiser: So, let’s start with Products Ads - What are Product Ads?

Answer: Alright – there are millions of searches happening on Daraz in a day. Every time, a keyword is searched, a plethora of products is displayed on the results page. A brand willing to optimize their product listing on their most relevant keywords needs an advertising system, through which, they can optimize their product listing in the most relevant manner to improve their conversions.  Hence, we launched Product Ads – the Daraz PPC version, which brands can use to run their campaigns on their entire product portfolio, targeting at least 100 keywords per product. All this is done by Daraz algorithm and machine learning, with zero human intervention.

So, this is about converting your existing demand and generating more conversions from the thousands of intent-based buyers. A user searching for your name, might be interested to buy from you, you make sure that you always bid on your own keywords, and a user searching a generic keyword can buy from anyone – Grab him too.

Advertiser: If a user is searching my brand name, then he/she is going to buy my product, then why should I spend on that keyword?

Answer: This is true, a user already demanding your product, is most probably going to buy from you, but the problem is ‘not always’. There are more than 3,000 partners running product ads campaigns, and if & when they are selling similar products, the system allows them to bid on your keywords too, democratically. Therefore, Your branded keywords are low hanging fruits, but there are many partners who can grab them too – So, always guard your keywords through Product Ads and get yourself covered!

If a brand continually ignores their branded keywords, a competitor can not only eat their search share through paid ads, but can also strengthen their organic semantic relation with the Algo in the long-term.

Advertiser: I got it. So, when I run my campaigns, Should I expect my products to be on the first tile when somebody searches.

Answer: it’s not only about the first tile or slot. It is also about your SOV on the entire set of listing that appear as a result of someone searching a keyword. Let’s say someone searches ‘Yamaha’ – 400 products load down the line. Within first 50, if 10 products are yours, then you have a 20% Share of Voice on the first 50 product listing view - you can increase that. We currently, do not tell the percentage share of how many products were ranked on what slots, but rather we focus on ROI and suggest that partners & advertisers view and analyze the campaign reports, where they can see a complete journey of their performance till the lowest funnel.

The most interesting thing is that we only charge you when a shopper/user clicks on your ad - & when they do, they land on a Product Detail Page – or a PDP.

A Product Detail Page – or a PDP. This is the most valuable page on the entire platform for every product as it is the last touchpoint in the user journey right before they make a purchase.

Q. Ok, How do I choose Keywords to boost my products through the Product Ads PPC Campaign?

Answer: You will login to your Advertiser Seller Center (ASC) to create your campaign. When creating campaign, you will be able to set the start date, put a daily budget, select products (It will already show your entire list of products), and then from advanced settings, you can select the end date & see the keywords on which the campaign will be run. You can manually select or deselect keywords, but you will get better result by running a recommended automated campaign (which means, you let the algorithm optimize keywords, and their bid prices in a real-time manner).

Advertiser: So, how do the system or Daraz Algo decides on which keywords my products should rank and how often.

Answer: Since, apart from delivering your product’s branding exposures on the listing, an important purpose of the Algo is also to bring more conversions, therefore, the decision stays with the Algo. However, to start off, there are few elements that the Algo considers when showing your product ads on the listing against a paid keyword. These elements include your bid prices (which always stays at its optimum, when running the automated campaign), the keyword’s historical CTR, and conversion rate related to your product, similar products in the same category, product’s titles and descriptions, user’s device & location, Age of the product on the platform & historical clicks on the product and so on. Since, there are millions of products listed on Daraz at a time, these 100’s of elements play their role in making your products appear to the right users at the right time on the right position.

Advertiser: Right! and what metrics of campaign reports can I see?

Answer: you can see a real-time report, as well as a historical report. As a performance marketers, you may be more interested in the historical report, since it shows all relevant lower funnel metrics that are attributed to your advertising with a 30 day last click lookback window. just to share, few of the metrics include Impressions, Clicks, CTR, A2C, Order, ROI and even Attributed GMV.

GMV is Gross Merchandise Value - is the total value of your sales.

Q. Do you have any benchmarks of ROIs?

Answer: How about you try it yourself and share your ROI, we will add up and a year from now, we would be able to publish a list of benchmarks on a category level. 😉

Advertiser: This sounds exciting, because it promises me real time as well as historical reporting of my spend – Also, since my products are already listed on Daraz and everyday they are fighting with competition from hundreds of similar products – So, I am going to try Products Ads – I will just need your help while setting up the campaign.

Answer: We will be more than happy to sit with you and make your first campaign.

Display Ads

Advertiser: Hey – What other solutions do you have? Since you mentioned that you have upper funnel as well? Umm Display Ads?

Answer: Yes! Our Display Ads – We have launched Display Ads to target our 2 Million+ DAUs on the app. We are offering two formats for display ads.

• One for a bigger impact, Reservation based buying model.
• The other for a longer impact - Auction based buying model. Introducing, Pay per Day & Pay per Impression.

Pay Per Day is a CPD (Cost per Day) buying format for advertisers with an ability to reserve a 24 hours dedicated ad space on Daraz app’s homepage with a 100% SOV for the ad. This allows a great exposure for every user who opens the app, no matter how many time they open it throughout the day. This is the bigger impact, but for a limited time period i.e. a single day.

now comes the longer impact.

Pay per Impression is a CPM (Cost per Mille) buying format, where advertisers can run their campaigns on multiple real estate on the apps homepage, reaching a wide variety of users for a longer duration than a day. Usually a month long.

In a one liner, CPM is for everyone for many days, while CPD is first come first serve for selective days.

Advertiser: Where will my display ads run, and how can I create them?

Answer: Your display ads run on Daraz App's most premium real estate, Homepage sliders and static banners. These assets tend to attract the most interested buyers, with most impressions served on them, because the offers are usually placed on these. therefore, our these two assets are our most premium CPD assets.

Advertiser: I understand CPD that I can run a full day fixed advertising on the premium placements, tell me more about CPM, since, CPM will allow me to run multiple always on campaigns for my different set of brands for a longer duration?

Answer: Yes, in that way, CPM campaigns will serve you the right way. This a completely self-serve campaign creation format, where you;

-        put your campaign budget (the system tells you an expected range of impressions that you can get in that budget).

-        from the Ad Group, Select the brand you want to run the campaign for.

-        Upload your creatives.

-        Put the landing page, usually your store on Daraz.

-        Put a max CPM bid that you are willing to pay.

-        You are all set.

Advertiser: It is amazingly simple, and very quick. How long will it take to go live.

Answer: It takes 24 hours by the system, as the system runs QC on your creatives and landing pages, and then your campaign goes live. If the creatives are rejected, you are notified on campaign creation screen and then you can recreate your campaign.

Advertiser: How not to get creatives rejected?

On the campaign creation screen, you will see DOs and DON'Ts for designing creatives, and a downloadable template for the designer. They will serve as your master guide – if followed correctly, no creatives will be rejected 😉

Advertiser: One last question about audience targeting on the CPM campaign - Can you share some details?

Answer: The CPM campaigns does an amazing device level targeting to increase your reach and exposure to a wide range of shoppers. The homepage targets each device with a smart frequency in order to get higher reach & more unique interactions. A user clicking on your ad can land on your store page, from where you can build your Store Followers, who can be later on retargeted on Daraz app through CRM pushes. 

Daraz Live & Affiliates

Advertiser: While we are at it, how about you share some details about Daraz Live too, as this would be an amazing avenue for us to add more vocals to our brand on the platform.

Answer: It surely adds more vibrance to your brand, in-fact, live commerce must be very frequent part of your advertising strategy and campaigns, to effectively formalize your 360 advertising strategy.

While, a show is live, your products can be pinned and put into the cart right while the audience is watching the show/product demo of the product or simply a subliminal integration of your product in the show.

Interestingly, when a user clicks on a product and lands on a PDP from the live show, the live show keeps running on the screen, just pops-down to the corner of the screen. Furthermore, if you land on to the PDP of the same product which was in the cart during the show - the show will again pop-up as demo in the same corner to allow users to watch it.

We can do a full detailed session on Daraz Live & Affiliate with a lot of strategy ideas - since it is about creating content - Sky is, literally, the limit.

Part 3: Integrated strategy

Advertiser: Summarizing on the Ad Solutions - I can get mass awareness through display ads and conversions from Product Ads, If I were to ask, which should I use, Product Ads or Display Ads?

Answer: To be honest, both. I tell you why. Product Ads are your lower funnel ads, they provide you cover for the audience who is searching products/keywords on the search bar. The other huge audience, which still chooses to click on banners to explore products will be missed, if you only run Product Ads.

Moreover, the ROI on search Ads will always be better if you run display ads alongside. Product Ads will be your ROI builder, but display ads will be your volume drivers– because, while display ads are upper funnel solution, our built in report for display shows few lower funnel metrics too.

Advertiser: So, on your automated solution, or as we call Self-Serve solutions, I should run both Search Ads and Display Ads together? Do you recommend any spend suggestion and frequency?

Answer: Umm, there is no one size fit all solution, but a smart way to decide is 70-30 ratio on your display and search, where display should get 70% of your spend, while search should be 30%. The percentage split can be very different based on your objective and searches in your desired category.

As far as frequency is concerned, Your Product Ads campaigns should be on always-on, throughout your advertising year, along with your CPM campaigns. – Together, they will generate and maintain the buzz & Biz which you can frequently uplift by putting some CPD campaign on the important events – such as a Product Launch, Campaign Launch – and sometimes for fun (JK).

Advertiser: Alright - Now, I have to pitch it to my senior leadership & brand teams, can you give me an idea where to start?

Answer: Let me share an interestingly simple and amazingly valuable formula.

See, Daraz has more than 2 Million DAUs, how many users visit your store on Daraz?

The answer is 'less than 1%' organically.

Each time you grow this number with a small margin, you grow your PDP views, which will eventually uplift your overall growth. Below I am showing a generic graph to show how your PDP views should grow at the time of advertising and if continued, the growth will be highly valuable over the time. The uplift in your PDP views should be directly proportional to your growth. For even better results, try multiple creatives, put better offers, put free shipping and see results.

You can also increase your Store Followers to increase your brand advocacy on Daraz and expand retargeting opportunities on the platform. See, a similar graph below, which shows how daily Store Followers grow when you run effective advertising, with amazing creative, communication and offers.

You can do similar analysis for your store visitors. Increasing your store traffic and store followers will strengthen your earned-media state on the platform, just like you would have done for you Facebook fan base. The only difference is that an increased traffic & follower base on Daraz is going to increase your sales too.

Advertiser: Interesting, can we plan another meeting with a wider audience from my media teams/agency to learn more about Product Ads, Display Ads & Daraz Live? We may have more questions very soon.

Answer: For sure, In fact, We are starting regular learning sessions in an interactive format. You can register for the next session/webinar for a crash course on Daraz Advertising. Click Here to Register

Advertiser: Sure, I am going to sign up as I would want to be in the list of those who like to get every update.

Answer: Please do share this registration link with others too, who would be willing to learn about Daraz Ads.

It was great talking to you, let's connect again and meet the broader teams and see things happening!

For now, that's it,

Don't forget to sign up/register for the Session!